My first thought, as I listened to this speech, was one of gratefulness that I had fallen into the friendly hands of my old coach companion, whose kindness still lived fresh in my memory; my next was, what peculiar form of madness could account for the strange outpouring I had just overheard, in which my own name was so absurdly introduced, coupled with family circumstances I knew never had occurred. Sleep was now out of the question with me; for whole hours long I could do nothing but revolve in my mind all the extraordinary odds and ends of my friend Bubbleton's conversation, which I remembered to have been so struck by at my first meeting with him. The miraculous adventures of his career, his hairbreadth 'scapes, his enormous wealth, the voluptuous ease of his daily life, and his habits of luxury and expenditure with which he then astounded me, had now received some solution; while, at the same time, there was something in his own common-sense observations to himself that puzzled me much, and gave a great difficulty to all my calculations concerning him. To all these conflicting doubts and difficulties sleep at last succeeded. But better far for me it had not; for with it came dreams such as sick men only experience: all the distorted images that rose before my wandering faculties, mingling with the strange fragments of Bubbleton's conversation, made a phantasmagoria the most perplexing and incomprehensible; and which, even on waking, I could not banish, so completely had Saladin and his pas seul, the guitar, the hookah, and the suit of red emeralds taken hold of my erring intellect. Candid, though not fair reader, have you ever been tipsy? Have you ever gone so far over the boundaryline that separates the land of mere sobriety from its neighboring territory, the country of irresponsible impulses, that you actually doubted which was the way back,--that you thought you saw as much good sense and good judgment on the one side of the frontier as the other, with only a strong balance of good-fellowship to induce a preference? If you know this state,--if you have taken the precise quantum of champagne or moselle mousseux that induces it, and yet goes no farther,--then do you perfectly understand all the trials and difficulties of my waking moments, and you can appreciate the arduous task I undertook in my effort to separate the real from the imaginary, the true types from their counterfeits; in a word, the wanderings of my own brain from those of Captain Bubbleton's.